If you are white collar then it's going to "disrupt" your field.

I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn't at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI "optimization" has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.

In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn't a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It's a wasteland.

I've been told to "go back to school." I'll be 41 soon. I'm still paying off my computer science degree. It's worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don't care. They'll do it anyways.

When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It'll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.

What is to be done?

  • LaughingLion [any, any]
    ·
    6 months ago

    Well, it's two fold.

    1. Most jobs don't actually need a super highly technical human being for all the tasks they need to perform. So much of IT and tech work is tedium and monotonous. Same shit every day. So you don't need super highly advanced AI to do it. Just something that is good enough. Sadly, in my experience the average tech worker isn't super bright anyways. I hate to sound ableist but it's the truth. They get the job done and deserve a good livable wage but they aren't inventing the new faster wireless charger.... they are struggling to get a router setup only slightly less than your average zoomer at home. If they are lucky they have a step by step guide someone else wrote that has been revised through trial and error by other techs.

    2. For the rest of it, yeah the AI will make mistakes and be bad. But companies will still keep a senior tech on salary to oversee this and also just grin and bear it when it does go haywire. If it doesn't cost them more money than what they made by the layoffs then it was a worthy sacrifice. Capitalist "innovation" doesn't have to be good it just has to be good enough.